The question remains though – especially when talking to funders and nonprofit leaders skeptical of advocacy (a lot of them jaded from personal experience), I’m unpersuasive when I claim something is cost-effective but can’t provide a single real-world example with numbers to back up that claim, so I’ve stopped doing that. Sure activism is nebulous and multivariate; so are many business decisions (to analogize), and yet it’s still useful to do quantitative estimation if you keep in mind that
the point isn’t to “pin a number”, it’s to reduce uncertainty to improve decision-making (Doug Hubbard corrects this misconception in How to Measure Anything, which is mainly about business decisions)
the main value of quantitative estimation (to me) is in surfacing and prioritizing new key questions that merely verbal argumentation wouldn’t highlight, cf. Holden Karnofsky on the value of GiveWell’s CEAs, more so than just ranking stuff
I have no idea honestly if activism should be over- or underweighted in EA; I suspect the answer is the economist’s favorite: “it depends”. I’d like to see more research on what makes some advocacy efforts more effective that’s adaptable to other efforts/contexts. And as a (small) donor myself I’m interested in allocating part of my “bets” capital to advocacy-related orgs like XR if I see / can make a persuasive marginal cost-effectiveness estimate for their efforts.
The question remains though – especially when talking to funders and nonprofit leaders skeptical of advocacy (a lot of them jaded from personal experience), I’m unpersuasive when I claim something is cost-effective but can’t provide a single real-world example with numbers to back up that claim, so I’ve stopped doing that. Sure activism is nebulous and multivariate; so are many business decisions (to analogize), and yet it’s still useful to do quantitative estimation if you keep in mind that
the point isn’t to “pin a number”, it’s to reduce uncertainty to improve decision-making (Doug Hubbard corrects this misconception in How to Measure Anything, which is mainly about business decisions)
the main value of quantitative estimation (to me) is in surfacing and prioritizing new key questions that merely verbal argumentation wouldn’t highlight, cf. Holden Karnofsky on the value of GiveWell’s CEAs, more so than just ranking stuff
I have no idea honestly if activism should be over- or underweighted in EA; I suspect the answer is the economist’s favorite: “it depends”. I’d like to see more research on what makes some advocacy efforts more effective that’s adaptable to other efforts/contexts. And as a (small) donor myself I’m interested in allocating part of my “bets” capital to advocacy-related orgs like XR if I see / can make a persuasive marginal cost-effectiveness estimate for their efforts.